


and you with it, a speck of dust

by minarchy



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Apartment AU, Depression, Developing Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 19:35:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13371669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minarchy/pseuds/minarchy
Summary: “You should get a plant,” 4D says, when Rafael stumbles through his window onto the fire escape. He’s sitting with his back to the street at this point, vape in his fist and fist is his lap, one leg crooked. That stupid moustache is still visible even through the two day stubble darkening the rest of his jaw.“Why,” Rafael says, not bothering to angle his tone to make it questioning. He doesn’t know why he even bothers to respond, beyond, perhaps, that unwilling knowledge of his isolation.4D sketches a hand through the air. “Oxygenates the room,” he says. “Relieves stress.”





	and you with it, a speck of dust

**Author's Note:**

> anyone remember when dirty hipster aus were all the rage? i still love them. this, i guess, is what happens when dirty hipsters grow up, but that's probably giving me too much credit.
> 
> i started this last year and have since realised that i am never going to get it to a point where i am genuinely happy with it, so i've cleaned it up as best i can, and now it's yours. thanks to ines for all her support (which really means you should blame her for bullying me into posting this)
> 
> unbeta'd, as always

    

 

 

 

 

**PÂRO**

_n._  the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, almost as a blessing,  _colder, colder, colder_.

 

 

“Did you remember to eat,” Rita says, her tinny voice stern even through the static of his phone. The sound of it stabs needles through his skull; he angles it further away from it face, lets it slip through his slack fingers until it is lying on the couch next to him, his other arm draped over his eyes. His breath tastes foul on his tongue. 

“No food in the house,” Rafael says, and he can imagine the expression she makes, her lips tightening into a thin line, her nostrils flaring with disapproval. He doesn’t know why she still cares.

“There’s a fucking 7/11 on your block,” she says. “Go and get some.”

Rafael must make a disagreeing sound, because she says,

“or I’m calling your mother,”

and that, really, is unfair.

“It won’t be open,” he says, trying to make out the time on his phone display through his eyelashes, eyes squeezed tight against the savage glow of the backlight.

“It’s nine pm, asshole,” Rita says. “You’re forty-two years old; get off your fucking ass and buy some food.”

 

 

He considers, briefly, shoving his face under the faucet to try and blast the bleariness from his brain, freshening himself up to go outside — by which he means spraying himself liberally with deodorant, because if he gets into the shower he’ll just fall asleep again the moment he gets out. The cold water makes him gasp, droplets of it catching on the intake in his nostrils and tricklingthe bitter iron-copper flavour into the back of his mouth. He coughs, gags, doesn’t vomit. 

No deodorant.

 

 

The fluorescent lighting of the store makes his headache worse; he wishes he could’ve got away with wearing sunglasses, but he’s far too aware of the way that his bloodshot eyes and his sleep-wrinkled suit make him appear, and he doesn’t need the cash registrar’s judgement on top of his own. He squints at the bright food packaging, and tries to find something that doesn’t make his stomach twist with nausea.

His phone pings, too loud, in his pocket. It’s Rita.

_No whiskey. Just food._  

_Fuck r u my sponsor_ , he types back, one handed.

_You wish, dicknuts_ , comes the reply, before he can manage to manipulate his fingers to the lock button without dropping it. _No vodka, either._

He rolls his eyes at the screen, and shoves it back into his pocket without replying.

Pop tarts and microwave burritos might not meet Rita’s standards for ‘real food’, but they’re the only thing that Rafael is willing to trust in his stomach at the moment. If he vomits now, he knows, he won’t stop until his entire body is twisted and empty, gasping snot and bile into the toilet bowl, and he doesn’t need another night like that. 

Also, screw her. It’s not his fault he can’t sleep without dreaming.

 

 

Something brushes the back of his mind as he trudges back up the four storeys to his apartment, hating every stair, his glasses slipping down his nose, the lenses fogged from the temperature change; it feels like a memory he can’t quite grasp, or the forerunner of déjà vu, or the voice of God.

“Hey, 4C.”

The voice is above him, nasal and cheerful, and Rafael curses the stairs even more. If this shitty building had a shitty elevator, this wouldn’t have happened. He doesn’t look up.

“Fun night?” says 4D — Rafael knows his name, but refuses to humanise him, with all his irritating friendliness and niceties and that fucking _beard_ — and Rafael can hear the tilt of his mouth, knows that 4D is making fun but doesn’t mean it nastily, and lets himself take the comment wrong on purpose.

_Haha_ , he thinks, imagines himself saying, _it’s 2013, I can self medicate if I want, this is fucking America_ , and doesn’t say because it’s not even a comeback and he won’t shame himself with that weak of a retort. He’s too hungover to come up with anything scathing enough to make 4D go away, which is disappointing, considering he was drunk less than three hours ago.

Despite his best intentions, he accidentally meets 4D’s gaze when he reaches the top of the stairs, and,

“the fuck is that growth of your face,” he says, the words tripping from his mouth before he has time to stop himself opening the avenue to conversation.

“What, this?” 4D says, his grin indicating that he knows full well what Rafael is talking about, his long, pale fingers coming up to stroke the moustache consuming his upper lip. “It’s Movember, 4C. Wanna sponsor me?”

“I refuse to give you financial incentive to maintain that monstrosity,” Rafael says, and feels the soothing balm of the counter seep into his throbbing skull.

“It’s for a good cause,” says 4D, with his implacable cheerfulness, “testicular cancer is one of the main killers in young men today.”

“I’m not a young man,” Rafael says, shouldering open his door and almost falling when his toe catches the inside of his other foot.

“Cancer can strike at any time,” 4D says, knowingly. “I should know, it’s my sign.”

“You know what the biggest killer of young men is?” Rafael says, on the other side of the door, now, hand braced to close it in 4D’s face. 

“Suicide,” 4D says, easily, as though Rafael is helping him prepare for a test. 

“So do us all a favour,” Rafael says, as savagely as he can manage, and slams the door closed. The satisfaction of it is ruined, somewhat, by the way the sound ricochets inside his head. He can taste his own fillings at the back of his mouth, and swallows back the rising bile.

 

 

It’s been two weeks without any forced interaction with his neighbour beyond the usual kicking at his wall when 4D has the volume too high for Rafael’s head to cope with. He has no idea what 4D does for employment, and doesn’t care, so long as his schedule differs enough from Rafael’s that they don’t meet in the hallway. 

November has swung through the city like a fog bank, shrouding Rafael’s days in the neon twilight of the Manhattan night. The wind bites at his face and his eyes and scrapes sharp needlepoint nails over his scalp when it rips through his hair, and he welcomes it, these sensations of reality. He leaves for work before the sun rises and comes home after it has set, and revels in his existence in the winter permanight. No one in the office bothers to ask him out for after-work socialising any more, and with the darkness comes the uptick in violence that keeps Rita busy, and off his back.

He doesn’t think about his loneliness. If he does, in those brief moments on the subway where he sees other people with their casual, joyful human interactions, the way the river of humanity flows around him, millions of people heading home to family, their lives full of connection and meaning, he feels something sharp inside his chest peel and crack, like tree sap in a wound, open and exposed to frost.

Loneliness is a contextual sensation, he tells himself. He doesn’t need people to validate his existence. He has Rita, and his mother, on those occasions where he is sober enough to bear her accusatory and sad eyes, and the stray cat that visits his building and eats the tins of cat food he leaves out on his fire escape, despite knowing he shouldn’t encourage it. This is enough.

4D would count as another human connection, he supposes, but that’s one he can definitely do without. Irrepressibly cheerful people who name themselves accordingly are people he doesn’t need to interact with; and he’s been feeling quite pleased with himself for having managed to avoid his neighbour for so long when he levers himself out of his window and onto the fire escape to smoke.

It’s three in the morning and the temperature is sitting in the low thirties, and Rafael had been comfortable with the idea that he would be alone in the darkness, until he spotted the familiar lanky outline of 4D against the ambient glow from the street below them.

He’s sitting on the edge of the platform, long legs dangling, the thick jacket he’s wearing not doing enough to conceal the narrowness of his shoulders, and he turns his face towards Rafael when he hears Rafael’s feet on the metal.

“4C,” he says, by way of greeting. White smoke trickles from his lips and nostrils as he speaks, and Rafael squints at the bulky square in his hand.

“Are you _vaping_ ,” he says, considering briefly heading back inside, but the building doesn’t allow smoking indoors after the fire two years ago, and the nicotine craving is itching at his skin. He lights up, and slides down the railing on the far side of the platform, his legs bent towards his torso against the wind.

4D glances down at the squat battery pack in his hand, and shrugs. “Yeah,” he says, pausing to take a long, crackling drag. “Bella made me quit, ‘cause of the baby.” Rafael watches as the words stream out from him in a long, dense cloud of vapour, the wind carrying it away from him. 4D has his hood up to cover his head and ears from the cold, but Rafael can see that his hair is loose underneath it, freed from its usual bun at the back of his head. He is still sporting that ridiculous moustache. He exhales a plume of smoke in 4D’s direction, in a childish attempt to make him go back inside, but 4D ignores it.

“So, Rafael,” is what he says, instead, “what brings you out here at the witching hour?”

He only ever calls him Rafael when it’s this late, as though the normal rules of the universe that Rafael has carefully and brutally enforced don’t apply.

“I thought that was midnight,” Rafael says.

“Nah,” 4D says, throwing more vapour out into the wind. “3AM. Flipside of the Holy Trinity, right? Like the three knocks.”

Rafael stares at him, face deliberately blank, and 4D shrugs, looking away.

“Three guesses,” Rafael says.

“Can’t sleep?” 4D says, and Rafael makes a mocking show of applause.

“What’s your excuse?” Rafael says, after several long minutes of silence. “You’re not usually out here at this time.”

4D opens his arms wide, rolling his shoulders back in a stretch that shifts the hood of his jacket, and lets some of his hair slide free and into his eyes. He doesn’t brush it away.

“The city doesn’t sleep,” he says, with a grin that, in the neon lighting, doesn’t seem to reach his eyes. “Why should I?”

Rafael can’t really argue with that.

“I can’t believe you’re _vaping_ ,” he says, several minutes later. “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more insufferably hipster.”

4D laughs, which was not Rafael’s intention. 

“Always got to be improving the brand, right?” he says, grinning; and, appallingly, winks at him. He levers himself to his feet, long limbs folding and unfolding beneath him like a concertina. “Don’t stay out too long,” he adds, resting one hand on Rafael’s shin, briefly. “You’ll catch your death.”

“Don’t pretend you aren’t rooting for the pneumonia,” Rafael says, as 4D refolds himself through his window. 

“Nah,” says 4D, dropping into his apartment and throwing Rafael one last, lopsided grin. “Your coughing would keep me up.”

 

 

The office that he works in has that look that would have been considered ‘sterile’ in the seventies, but now is faded beige and lopsided polystyrene ceiling tiles, and it smells of mould and dust and cheap cleaning fluid. The lights in the elevator don’t work properly, casting deeper shadows in the hollows of his face, and he tries not to meet his own eyes in the mirrors as he rides it up to the seventh floor, staring fixedly ahead at the warped, muted reflection of himself in the brushed stainless steel of the doors.

No one tries to talk to him as he enters. Desks are lined neatly into rows, the image of order intended ruined by the piles of overflowing paper in intrays and littered across surface, files and paper crates leaking out of cupboards. He remembers, vaguely, that they were supposed to be bringing in a ‘paperless initiative’. His boss had tried to make a pun out of it: ‘paper less’. No one had laughed.

He has spent almost half of his life here, at this desk, watching the damp creep further along the far wall, drinking too much shitty coffee and eating too much vending machine food. He doesn’t know what else he would do.

(Only he does, and this is the problem. Or, rather, what he _could_ have done, and now it is far, far too late.)

 

 

He leaves the office at six, gets home before seven. Routine. There is music coming from 4D’s apartment, muted through the walls, and this is also routine. The tin of food he left out for the cat is still full, but it’s only been a day, and it hasn’t frozen over, so he leaves it.  

Briefly, he considers the contents of his fridge, and then abandons the idea. His eyes hurt from squinting at contracts all day, and he’s exhausted, despite the time. There should be half a bottle waiting for him by the couch, where he had left it the previous day, and that might be enough to take the edge off, let him have a few hours of unconsciousness before his bladder wakes him.

On the couch, fully clothed, staring blankly at the steadily decreasing volume in the bottle between his fingers, he realises he hasn’t spoken to anyone all day.

 

 

“You should get a plant,” 4D says, when Rafael stumbles through his window onto the fire escape. He’s sitting with his back to the street at this point, vape in his fist and fist is his lap, one leg crooked. That stupid moustache is still visible even through the two day stubble darkening the rest of his jaw.

“Why,” Rafael says, not bothering to angle his tone to make it questioning. He doesn’t know why he even bothers to respond, beyond, perhaps, that unwilling knowledge of his isolation.

4D sketches a hand through the air. “Oxygenates the room,” he says. “Relieves stress.”

Rafael squints one eye at him through the cigarette smoke being wafted back into his face by the wind. “It’d just die,” he says.

“You can piss in it when you can’t be bothered to make it to the bathroom,” 4D says, the ghost of a grin just visible through the gloom. Rafael raises an eyebrow, and says,

“is that what the kids are doing these days?”

and 4D laughs. He looks tired, the skin under his eyes loose and sagging, shadows through into sharp relief by the warm light streaming out through his window.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, easily. “Saves water, nitrogen is good for the soil,” he circles his hand again, _et cetera_.

“Free cologne,” Rafael says.

“I always wondered why it was called eau de toilette,” 4D says, his accent mangling the French beyond recognition, and Rafael hides his snort badly in his sleeve.

 

 

Rafael wakes in his bed, which makes a change. He doesn’t quite remember making it across the room from the couch, much less removing his clothes, but here he is, groggily conscious and in his boxers and socks. Swinging his legs over the side, he braces himself on his knees for a moment, head bent, waiting for the sloshing of his brain to still inside his head.

It is clearly daylight outside, that cold, hazy grey of winter, but the curtains are drawn, and the apartment is filled with shadows that make him think of when smoking in bars what still allowed, and the air would become thick and tangible and murky. He misses that time with that vague sense of nostalgia that comes from an awareness of the rose tint that memory has thrown over it. It’s not the era that he misses more than the way he had felt, then. Younger, brighter, the potential of a future still peeking over the horizon. More alive.

In the half light of his apartment, he can make out the unhealthy sheen of his skin, the greyish hue under the dark hair from the lack of sunlight. His stomach sags against the waistline of his boxer shorts, skin loose and flesh distended from the alcohol. His ribs, when he scratches absentmindedly beneath one nipple, are easily noticeable beneath the skin. He should eat more. He has no appetite.

His phone chimes, somewhere beneath the mass of sheet, bunched and lopsided over the lower half of the bed.

_George is coming to lunch_ , Rita says.

_Good for him_ , he writes back, using the notification reply when his phone refuses to unlock to his sweaty, trembling thumb print. The shaking is always worse in the morning.

_You’re coming too_ , Rita says, and Rafael swears, dragging his hand down his face. He considers just not going, pretending that he fell asleep again and missed the message, but Rita knows where he lives, and she will bring lunch, and George, to him, just to piss him off.

His apartment is a litter of empty bottles and empty cartons and discarded food wrappings, his clothes strewn carelessly around, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with the disgust on Rita’s face when she picks her way through the mess. He checks the time on his phone; a little after twenty to twelve. He has slept for over ten hours, which is impressive.

When he pushes himself to his feet, the stale smell of his skin rises, and he wrinkles his face. His head feels as through it has been packed full of wet cotton wool, and he can taste the layer of coffee and whiskey and cigarette smoke on his tongue; Rita is used to his perpetual disarray, but George, with his sharp, lazy eyes, will ask him about it, and he can’t deal with that today, either.

“Fuck,” he says, his voice muffled as he scrubs both hands over his face, swaying slightly as his knees try to decide if they want to hold his weight.

 

 

An hour later, he is shuffling into the café that Rita always uses for these monthly lunches; it used to be the bar that they hung out in, old leather and sticky linoleum and a fragrant stench of old urine and old beer, but it had folded years ago. Now, it is dark stained wood and small tables and twenty-somethings drinking coffee and reading philosophy books they have no context to understand. The old leather is still here, morphed though it is from bar stools to rescued couches that are probably as old as him.

It isn’t hard for him to find their table; the three of them are easily the oldest people there. Rita is kitted out in her usual casual affair of an untucked shirt and chinos, her hair pulled back into a pony tail that hangs between her shoulder blades, but it’s George that simultaneously stands out and fits in, Rafael considers, as he shrugs out of his coat and scarf and drops down onto the couch opposite them. With his small, round glasses and the hems of his jeans rolled up to mid calf despite the cold weather, George looks like a greying version of the youths around them, his t-shirt too large and the v-neck cut too low for Rafael’s taste — but then, he is wearing an ancient star wars t-shirt and a cardigan, the only things he could find that were clean, so he supposes he can’t judge.

“Rafael,” George says, with his smooth, smiling voice. Rafael wonders if his teeth are as sharp as they look, white and gleaming in his mouth. “It’s good to see you.”

“You combed your hair,” Rita says, pressing her lips against his cheek in greeting, and Rafael says,

“the effort’s for George, not you,” and George laughs.

“I appreciate the gesture,” he says, “but if you’d come in your natural form, it would only serve to make me look better.”

“Do you hear the silent ‘even’,” says Rita. “We all know you're the prettiest, George, don’t pretend you didn’t preen for an hour before coming here,” and pushing a cup towards him, dark liquid steaming. “It’s just coffee,” she adds, blithely, “I already ordered for you.”

“I never doubted it,” Rafael says, accepting the cup and gulping down half of it in one go.

“You can’t blame me,” George says, ignoring their exchange, “I mean, a man’s gotta eat,” and Rafael trades amused glances with Rita when he drawls a smile at their bearded waiter, who’s heavily tattooed hands are carrying the tray with their food.

“Still feasting on the souls of the youth?” Rafael says, as George brings his attention back to them. “Do you apply their blood to your face at night to maintain your Dorian Gray appeal?”

“Please,” Rita says, “we all it’s George’s facial of choice isn’t _blood_ ,” and Rafael chokes a little on his sandwich, inhaling crumbs, and George’s deep laughter rings out between them.

“I am eating,” he says, archly. “Can we not talk about semen when there is food in my mouth.”

“Speaking of semen,” George says, leaning forward with his dark eyes dancing, “and things in your mouth,”

“ _No_ ,” says Rafael.

“How’s your neighbour?” George continues, unfazed, and Rita is smirking, the traitor. “Are you still pretending that your annoyance with him isn’t hiding a desire to fold him in half over your dining table — or, if you are,” and his tongue flicks out to run along the edges of his incisors, “can I have him?”

“A,” Rafael says, “please don’t make me listen to your sex voice through my walls, and b, I find many people annoying without secretly wanting to fuck them.” George is smirking, the expression a languid slide across his face. “For example,” Rafael says, “you’ve been annoying me for years, and the only thing I would want you in my bed for is to smother you with a pillow.”

“We all know that’s not true,” Rita says, snorting. 

“That was years ago,” George says, casually, swatting the comment away with a wave of his hand. “We were all whores in the eighties.”

“He’s moved on to younger meat,” Rafael says.

“But yours is so nicely marinated,” Rita says, arching an eyebrow at him. Rafael flips her off against the side of his cup.

 

 

The TV keeps playing awkward, romantic Christmas movies, and Rafael can’t find his remote. He misses when you could change the channel manually. There are televisions now that you can control with your phone, he knows, but that seems like a technological leap he isn’t yet prepared to make — it seems like too much extra effort to just be sitting on your ass some more, and also, he can’t find his phone either.

He had fallen asleep, earlier, lulled by the cheesy, bland material and the warmth of the Indian food in his stomach, and had dreamed of snow, and Christmas lights, and eating takeout from a carton in his own office, on a couch that smelled of leather polish, shifting through stacks of paper, ink stains on his fingers. HIs abuela had been alive.

The nervy, restless craving for nicotine is dancing under his skin, overpowering even his desire to drown the dream in the annual office Christmas gift of cheap, bitter wine. His throat feels wet, and every breath feels too sharp, and, _shit_ , he isn’t going to cry. This is why he hates dreaming.

4D is already outside when he manages to shrug into the puffer jacket that might as well be a duvet with sleeves, lighting the cigarette in the still air of his apartment before clambering out the window. The cat is there, too. It’s sitting on 4D’s lap, allowing him to stroke it, and Rafael feels a touch of betrayal.

“What are you doing?” he says. 

4D looks up at him, and grins. The moustache is still there but the rest of his beard is growing out to meet it, hiding the lower half of his face. Rafael remembers that it’s December.

“Hello to you, too,” 4D says. 

“That’s my cat,” Rafael says.

“No, it’s not,” 4D says. His head is uncovered, but he’s wearing a ludicrously large scarf that bunches up over his ears like a cowl. The wind keeps catching at errant strands of hair, and tousling them into his eyes. The cat is watching Rafael with a heavy-lidded, satisfied expression, and he scowls at it.

“Okay,” he admits, leaning back against the railings. “So it’s not my cat.”

4D’s grin is spreading slowly across his face. It makes his eyes crinkle into slits, and Rafael doesn’t understand why anyone who’s face did that would risk losing their vision just to smile. 

“What do you call him?” he says, his fingers playing through the cat’s fur. Beneath the treachery, Rafael begrudgingly admits that it’s sensible to be stealing body warmth, given the weather.

“He’s a cat,” says Rafael, curtly. “He doesn’t have a name.”

“You called him _your_ cat,” 4D says, and he is enjoying himself far too much, watching Rafael cross his arms across his chest. He tells himself that its to keep out the cold, but he’s aware it’s a defensive gesture, and that he looks like a petulant child. “Come on,” 4D says, wheedling. “What’s his name?”

Rafael scowls, works his jaw, exhales a cloud of smoke. “Rico,” he says, after a long moment, feeling the words leave him like an unwilling confession. 4D contorts his spine to curl himself forward so he can look into the cat’s face.

“Is that your name?” he says. The cat flicks at ear at him, and 4D laughs,

Rafael says, “fuck off,” and the cat purrs.

 

 

His mother is going to Cuba for Christmas.

Last week dreams had been so bad, so vivid, that he hadn’t been able to shake himself free of them completely, which is why he had approached the man in the bar the other night, called him by his name.

“I know you, hermano?” the man had said, and it had taken Rafael a solid three seconds before realising that no, he didn’t.

“Sorry,” he’d said, backing away. “I thought you were someone else.”

“That how you know my name?” the man had said, and Rafael tries to figure out if he is becoming aggressive or if that’s just the way he’s used to talking, brusque and in your face. The Amaro in his dream had the same face, the same habits, the same way of moving, but Rafael is drunk, and doesn’t trust his body.

This isn’t the first time he had seen someone that he’s dreamed about. He’d walked past Munch in a bookstore, stood behind Fin in line for the deli counter. But they weren’t the same people; they were just figments his brain had conjured to fill the space between his waking hours, people he has seen and his subconscious has remembered, given lives and roles in this constant barrage of _what if_.

This is, however, the first time he has slipped. He hopes he isn’t about to be given a thick lip.

“Look,” says the man, Amaro, up in his face but his voice is lowered now, not shouting, but Rafael can’t tell if he’s trying to keep their conversation discrete or if he’s just become more threatening, “you wanna come in here, cruise for guys, that’s your business, but that’s not my scene, comprende?”

“Sí,” Rafael had said, trying to end the exchange as quickly as possible, just wanting to forget what had happened and shuck the shame crawling over his skin. “Lo siento.”

The man had watched him for a beat longer, and then said, “you got someone to take you home? You look like you’ve had enough,”

and though he might have intended to be kind, Rafael had read it as an indication that it was time to leave. That hadn’t stopped him from setting up in another bar, and drinking until he couldn’t feel his face. 

He had had lunch with his mother the next day, and he’d still been drunk, hadn’t been able to sleep it off long enough and the hangover had already started creeping up on him, both complications of alcohol blearing him simultaneously.

“Rafi,” Lucia had said, eyes taking in his unshaven face and the redness of his eyes, “you have to stop drinking like this.”

Rafael had waved her off, incapable of entering any kind of serious conversation, let alone about himself, but then Lucia had said,

“you want to turn in your father?”

and he had just had enough. He hadn’t snapped at her, to his unending relief, because he doesn’t think he can live with how that would follow him around for the rest of his life, but he had pushed himself roughly to his feet, wobbling the table dangerously, and walked out, ignoring her calling after him.

So, Lucia is going to Cuba for Christmas. She’s going to be around family, which is good for her, because Catalina is gone and Rafael is a poor substitute. Rafael is going to be alone on Christmas, which serves him right, and also means he doesn’t have to put on a brave face, and pretend to be enjoying himself, pretend that there isn’t something missing from his life, constantly thrown in his face every time he closes his eyes.

He hears the moment 4D comes home. Rafael has been out on the fire escape, chain smoking, for far longer than would be advised, given the temperature; miniature snow drifts have banked against the wall on his window sill, and the fire escape itself feels treacherous with ice, but the air is still, for once, and he doesn’t want to go back inside.

“Merry Christmas,” 4D says, looping one long leg through his window, the rest of him following with surprising grace. “Bum a cigarette for a dollar?”

Rafael raises an eyebrow, and holds out the pack for him to take his own; 4D immediately roots around in his pockets after lighting up, the cigarette balanced between his lips, and Rafael rolls his eyes.

“I don’t want your dollar,” he says. “Call it a Christmas present, if you’re going to get weird about it.”

4D’s grin crinkles his whole face. “Knew you were going soft on me, Rafael.”

“I’ll have it back, if you’re going be like that,” Rafael says, lifting his arm, but 4D opens his hands wide and steps back, still grinning.

“Thanks,” he says, taking a drag so deep that Rafael can see the tip working it’s way down the paper. “Dropped my vape outside church,” he adds, by way of explanation, “glass smashed; I haven’t got a spare.”

They smoke in silence for a while, 4D practically eating his cigarette whilst Rafael, on his fourth in ten minutes, takes his time. The spirit of the season must be getting to him, or he’s more melancholy than he thought, because he wordlessly offers the pack again when 4D puts the stub out in the snow after less than a minute, clearly jonesing.

“Thought you’d be with family,” he says, watching 4D out of the corner of his eye. He’s clearly been to Mass, despite the fact that Rafael is sure he had already gone that morning; his hair is combed and parted, the ends tucked into the collar of his shirt, he has trimmed his beard back. Christmas Mass must make for more of an effort than normal.

4D shrugs. “Not this year,” he says. “What about you? Aren’t you normally with your ma?”

Rafael doesn’t ask him how he knows this. “She’s gone to Cuba for the holidays,” he says, looking away from the other man and out towards the street. 

“You not going with her?”

“We had a fight,” Rafael says, after a beat. “I was drunk.”

“I’m sorry, man,” 4D says, and he sounds like he genuinely means it. “Family’s hard, I get it.”

“That why you’re not with them?” Rafael says, although he has never actually seen any of 4D’s family in the building. He has talked about them before, always with Rafael pretending he’s not listening, but they never seem to come to visit.

4D sucks on his teeth, and makes a sound like might have been supposed to be a rueful laugh. “Nah,” he says. “They kicked me out when I was in college.” He must catch Rafael’s surprised look, because he continues, “someone sent Teresa a picture of me kissing a guy at some stupid party. I tried to convince them it was a mistake, or a dare, or a prank, or something, but they weren’t having none of it. Dad insisted I was gay, and he wasn’t having no gays under his roof — and, to be fair, _I_ thought I was gay, too. I was on this whole,” he waved the hand holding the cigarette through the air, red tip tracing fire, “journey of self discovery, or some shit, and I figured, like, liking girls was part of still being closeted, right? Like a leftover from the social enforcement of my youth.” 

That last part sounds like a quote. Rafael knows the kind of people that would have told him that. For himself, Lucia hadn’t been too impressed with his own ‘journey of self discovery’, but Catalina hadn’t cared one way or the other, and she had brought her daughter round.

“I mean, I thought it was one way or the other, right? Being bi wasn’t even part of the conversation. Not that it would’ve mattered, unless I’d kept it under wraps and married a girl.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it feels inadequate. 4D shrugs, easily.

“It is what it is,” he says. “You should should call your ma,” he adds. “You had a bad day, maybe she had a bad day, I don’t know, _you_ don’t know. But she’s your ma.”

“Yeah,” says Rafael, and he knows he will. “You going to call your folks?”

“Eh,” 4D says, and his whole posture echoes the word. “I used to. Every year. Bella’s the only one that talks to me, now. She says it upsets Ma.”

Rafael wants to say _I’m sorry_ again, but it feels too blithe in his mouth, so instead he says, “you think they’ll ever come around?” and 4D huffs a laugh through his nose.

“I got a cousin,” he says, “Vittoria? She lives in Maine, now. Three kids, big house, good career. She got married on New Years, you know? Got her licence the moment they passed the bill.”

“She’s gay,” Rafael says. 4D’s face does something that might be angry, or might be sad; a pursing of his mouth and flaring of his nostrils.

“They don’t even say her name,” he says. “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

“I’m sorry,” Rafael says, because it’s the only thing he can say. 4D seems to understand. He offers him another cigarette. “You know, 4D,” he says, trying to lighten the tone, “I know Christmas is the season for sharing, but maybe you should’ve got your own pack on your way home.”

4D laughs, and throws him a sideways look through his scrunched eyes. “That dollar’s still on the table,” he says, and Rafael snorts. 

“Hey, Rafael,” he says. “It’s Christmas, yeah? No one’s around. You can use my name.”

Rafael rolls his eyes at him, but behind the coaxing, teasing expression on 4D’s face is something else, something sad, and Rafael feels his resolve breaking, a little. He shouldn’t have got into this humanising conversation.

“Fine,” he says, and 4D blinks at him, startled and pleased. “ _Sonny_.”

 

 

New Year’s is hard. 

Normally he does his best to ignore all signs of the changing year, the way that everything around him is telling him that this is the time for change, to improve his life, to make a better year. It’s the overuse of exclamation points that get him, these days; but it’s not the constant barrage of empty positivity that is strangling him, this year.

His dreams are leaving him feeling wrung out and stressed and in desperate need of a drink, and he's hopelessly grateful that the office closes for the Christmas week because he has been even less capable of pretending that he’s a real person than normal. 

If he didn’t know any better, wasn’t fully aware that this is his own, private hell — and when Rafael thinks of God, he knows that He is cruel and vindictive, because there can be no other reason for why he is constantly presented with a life that could’ve been his, in such consistent and precise and impossible detail — he would think that 4D ( _Sonny_ , he thinks, and doesn’t know why his mind has started correcting him, after just one confessional exchange in the dead of night) is suffering as well. He has taken to playing his music almost constantly, the rough growl of Leonard Cohen rippling through their shared wall, as though he is trying to drown something out.

Rafael wonders how much alcohol he’d have to drink in order to drown himself in it. He has a vague memory of the concept, drinking too much water so it floods the brain. It sounds peaceful.

 

 

He doesn’t remember how he got home. Supposedly, he walked, because his feet hurt and there is no way that he managed the subway in this state, much less convinced a cab to take him. His sleeves are covered in snow and his scarf has got caught inside his sleeve, steadily tightening with each movement he makes, and he can’t figure out how to disentangle it. God knows where his keys are.

It’s Sonny that finds him like that, slumped on the stairs halfway between the third and fourth floor. Rafael doesn’t even recognise him until he hears his voice, the thick accent weaving its way through his whiskey-logged senses.

“Hey,” its saying, hands on his elbows, stopping his attempts to push him away, “hey, Rafael, you alright? You hurt?”

“Go away,” Rafael says, or attempts to say. His lips are numb, and his tongue feels too big for his mouth. He isn’t sure what comes out.

“Let’s get you inside,” the accent is saying, or maybe it says something else; everything sounds too loud and too faraway all at once, like he’s underwater. Maybe he is. Maybe he did it, and is finally drowning. He read somewhere it’s supposed to be painful, but he doesn’t really feel anything, beyond a vague sense of distortion, the world moving around him, big hands on his arms and his back, warm even through the layers of fabric, reaching inside his coat.

Maybe he’s being mugged. Perhaps he should fight back; realistically, he should fight back, Rafael knows, but also, they might kill him, and that would make everything so much easier. Everything would be quiet, and he wouldn’t have to dream. 

A long sleep, without dreaming. Maybe there is a heaven, after all.

 

 

Everything hurts. This doesn’t feel like death — it doesn’t even feel like dying. Rafael feels cheated.

“Here,” a voice is saying, and there is a hand on his neck, helping him lift his head, a cold glass against his lips. Liquid touches his mouth, sloshes against the back of his throat, and he chokes, spluttering, instead of swallowing, trying to push it away. “It’s just water,” the voice is saying. “Come on, drink.”

It feels less effort to acquiesce than to fight, so Rafael does, allows the cool water to slip over his tongue and trickle down his throat.

“Don’t gulp,” the voice is saying, “you’ll choke,” and Rafael wants to say _I know, asshole, what do you think this is, my first time?_ but the yawning chasm of unconsciousness opens beneath him, and he falls back down, down, into its welcoming arms.

 

 

When he wakes the second time, he is covered in cold sweat and his head feels like an eighteen-wheeler ran over it. There is an empty plastic garbage bin next to the couch that isn’t usually there, but he doesn’t have time to ponder how it managed to walk across his apartment and also empty itself before his attempts to sit upright send his stomach into his throat and he is emptying a long, spluttering stream of whiskey and stomach fluids into it.

Eyes burning, he spits and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. That’s the first time he notices that the chair opposite him isn’t vacant. It also isn't usually there at all, being part of the two he has under his barely-used dining table.

Sonny is sitting there, long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, a book open in his lap, although his eyes are on Rafael, now. He recognises the book as one of his, and tries to figure out how he feels about his neighbour rummaging through his things whilst he sleeps, but can’t grasp any emotion beneath the rolling nausea and throbbing headache.

"Morning, sunshine,” Sonny says, and Rafael tries to scowl at him.

“That's my book,” he says, and Sonny’s beard moves with his lopsided smile, lifting the cover so Rafael can see the title. 

“I can never get my head around pessimist philosophy,” Sonny says, and Rafael snorts, immediately regretting it when light spots dance across his vision. 

“What did you think it was,” he says, “one of those self-study books?”

“You have to admit,” Sonny says, “ _the Gay Science_ is something of a misnomer.”

“Not homosexual,” Rafael says, throwing an arm over his eyes and swallowing, open mouthed, against the taste of bile on the back of his tongue.

“Not happy, either,” Sonny says. “You want some water?”

“Please,” Rafael says, and hears Sonny creak upright and the faucet run. A trickle of suspicion starts to worm its way through his fogged mind, and after it comes the acid feeling of guilt.

“Have you been here all night?”

Sonny presses the glass into his hands, and Rafael recognises the feeling of Sonny’s palms against the backs of his fingers. It’s disquieting.

“Sure,” he says, easily, rolling his shoulders. He’s dispensed with most of the layers that Rafael normally sees him swathed in, and his wrists look very fragile in the murky light filling the apartment. The air seems hazier than normal, and Rafael sees the bulky form of his vape sticking out of one pocket. He wonders why Sonny is often out on the fire escape, if he can get his fix indoors. “You were so out of it, you might’ve choked on your own tongue.”

Rafael studies him, gaze careful. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says. Sonny shrugs his bony shoulders. Rafael can see the sharp jut of his clavicle, and the harsh line of his jaw under the beard. He doesn’t look well. The pale light slicing through a gap in the curtains catches on his skin as he retakes his chair, and he looks luminous in the dull room.

“It’s no bother,” he says, easily. 

“You didn’t sleep?” It’s not what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, _you sat for seven hours in a hardwood dining chair, and I’ve never said a kind word to you_.

Sonny shrugs again, his face in that lopsided smile. “Seems you slept enough for both of us,” he says, and Rafael braces for the questioning.

“You were in quite a state,” Sonny says, his tone easy but Rafael can feel the careful probing of his words, the way he is offering a conversation, as though talking about it can be healing. Rafael doesn’t say anything. “You said,” Sonny continues, a line forming between his eyebrows, and his pale eyes very bright where the light hits them, “something about ‘they’re letting him defend himself’, when I found you on the stairs. You said something about a deal that she should’ve taken.”

Shame — although that is not quite the right word, because Rafael doesn’t feel guilty about what his unconscious mind produces, but the sense of intrusion, of discovery, is the same — crawls over his skin. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doubts Sonny will let it go.

“Who is ‘she’?” Sonny says, his tone very careful.

“It’s just a dream,” Rafael says, not looking at him. “Just a fucking dream that won’t leave me alone.”

“Is it always the same?”

When he laughs, Rafael can hear the bitterness in his voice, rancid and anguished. This, more than the admission, this conversation, shames him. “No,” he says, “no, it’s never the same; or it is, but not really.”

Sonny is watching him. Rafael can feel his eyes, the weight of his gaze, and when Rafael eventually turns his face back towards him, ready for the confrontation, he sees something he isn’t expecting, something wary, and tentative and terrified. As though Sonny is standing on a precipice and he’s just waiting — for what? For Rafael to say something — for Rafael to _confirm_ something?

“It’s like,” he says, without knowing why he is telling Sonny this, when he hasn’t told anyone, not really, not for over a decade, “another version of my life — a _better_ version of my life. Taunting me.”

“Is that why you drink?” Sonny says, and there is something off in his voice. Rafael can’t place it.

“Yeah,” he says, flatly, unable to summon the emotional energy to care. “If I drink enough, I don’t dream.”

“That’s because you’re unconscious,” Sonny says, “not asleep. It’s not restful.”

“Dreaming isn’t fucking restless either,” Rafael snaps. “Me, there, I’m still wound tight as fuck. It’s not _relaxing_ , to see myself—” he waves a hand, looking for the word, “ _achieve_.”

“Like an alternate universe,” Sonny says, and the oddness in his tone still hasn’t left, “like in _Star Trek_.”

“Yeah,” Rafael says, laughing without humour. “Only we’re the mirrorverse.” And then what Sonny said sinks in, and he turns his head too fast for the cement mixer in his brain, staring at him. “How—” he says, when he means to say _you too?_ but doesn’t know how to say that without confirmation first, because it sounds too desperate, too _insane_ —

“Yeah,” Sonny says, and there is something like a relaxing in the muscles of his face, or perhaps a deflation. “Me too.”

 

 


End file.
